Communication systems have a limited capacity for carrying subscriber traffic, and accordingly many communication systems employ traffic shaping to control incoming traffic to guarantee performance and fairness by limiting packets which exceed predefined criteria. Current traffic shaping schemes perform rate capping per subscriber and service flow class, but do not consider sector and base station parameters. Known rate capping methods are static, i.e., the maximum and minimum rates are configured as fixed network parameters. For example, a subscriber with a 100 Kbps maximum rate cap will be capped at this rate regardless of whether there is additional backhaul and/or base station capacity. Thus, these known methods do not efficiently manage available resources.